If you've been reading the papers, watching television or surfing the Internet over the past four months, you'll know The Secret: Rhonda Byrne's bestselling New Age DVD and book promoting "The Law of Attraction"--that as a man (or woman) thinketh, so shall he or she be. Nothing much is new in that idea, which has a several-thousand-year history running from Hinduism right into Christian parables featuring lilies.

What's new is the magnitude and velocity of The Secret's success. With 3.8 million copies of the $23.95 hardcover in print in the United States alone, and an estimated 1.5 million copies of the $34.95 DVD sold, Byrne's rate of sales is nearly unrivaled in the annals of self-help snake oil. And these figures don't include the $4.95 digital downloads of the film from the Secret website. Even among self-help classics such as M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled (10 million copies sold over three decades) and Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life (22 million sold over five years), Byrne's enterprise promises to break records for sales rates if not totals. The book is on bestseller lists in the United States, Australia (Byrne's home), England and Ireland, and some thirty translations are slated.

There's no problem, large or small, for which this bestseller doesn't claim to have an answer. Mired in debt? No problem, just start visualizing checks and paste a phony $1 million bill on the ceiling above your bed (so you'll see it first thing in the morning). Suffering from cancer? Skip the chemo and focus on healing thoughts. Need a parking place? Picture yourself pulling into that perfect unmetered spot. And while you're at it, get yourself a late-model car. The universe, The Secret asserts, is akin to a mail-order business and "your job is to declare what you would like to have from the catalog."

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